We have already established that the complaints about the NBA’s long regular season are misguided, and that random games in December or January are good, actually, given the league’s current depth and breadth of talent. The playoffs now approach, and further proving the point is the Western Conference, which has proven to be a glorious soap opera of both on- and off-court happenings that have made the latter part of the season absolutely fascinating.
With just two games left to play, that two-game margin is what separates the third-place Los Angeles Lakers from the eighth-place Minnesota Timberwolves. Two teams — the Denver Nuggets and the Los Angeles Clippers — sit at 48-32, and three teams — the Golden State Warriors, the Memphis Grizzlies, and those Timberwolves — are at 49-33, setting the stage for various tiebreakers to determine who is forced to work through the play-in games and what the eventual first-round matchups will be.
Meanwhile, somehow two of those top eight teams fired their coaches with just a few games remaining before the playoffs (Memphis and Denver). The two-seed in the West, the Houston Rockets, have been solidifying that position for months but every other team still seems eager to play them in round one. The Lakers and Warriors, up through January both moribund teams with aging (very aging) superstars that were on national TV far too often for their actual title prospects, completely upended their seasons by adding Luka Dončić and Jimmy Butler, respectively, and are now legitimate threats to make a deep run. The Clippers functionally did the same thing when Kawhi Leonard finally returned from injury and looked like Kawhi Leonard again.
Even toward the bottom of the standings things have been interesting. The Dallas Mavericks, fresh off making the single dumbest trade in NBA history when they shipped Luka to the Lakers, have gotten their battalion of injured players back and somehow held off the putrid Phoenix Suns for the final play-in spot. The Portland Trailblazers showed substantial signs of life in the second half of the season. Though his season ended early, Victor Wembanyama exists and that is enough.
The final weekend of the season will see some of those jumbled up three-through-eight teams play each other, with obvious seeding ramifications — Grizzlies-Nuggets on Friday, Clippers-Warriors on Sunday. The Clippers could still conceivably finish as high as third and as low as eighth; according to Basketball Reference’s playoff probabilities calculator, the current eighth-seeded Timberwolves have the highest odds to finish fourth. In the most fun possible meaning of the word, it’s a mess!
And meanwhile, hovering serenely above the roiling masses, the Oklahoma City Thunder are finishing up one of the most dominant regular seasons in NBA history. They have a point differential of +12.6, the highest of all time by a decent chunk. They hold a 14-game lead over second place. There is a chance that all the maneuvering and coach-firing and trades that have made this end run so fun will just be fodder for the OKC wood chipper; we might look up in a couple of months and they’ll be up 3-0 in the Finals having lost one or two games all playoffs long.
The NBA’s regular season is good; this year, the West offering this much chaos is a big reason why.
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